What’s Happened?

Past month: Deployments

What: South Sudan crisis

who: HOT OSM, GISCorps, Ushahidi, OpenCrisis, MapAction

where: South Sudan

what: OpenCrisis set up coordination skypechat and googledoc (http://bit.ly/1f9C457) for groups mapping the South Sudan crisis. HOT OSM has mapped several affected areas, in collaboration with UNITAR/UNOSAT, HIU (State Dept) with assistance from GISCorps and, for area identification, OpenCrisis (BOH). MapAction has also been working with OCHA. sending a two-person team to Juba for a period.

OpenCrisis platforms: Migration to WordPress almost complete (just link integrity survey and fettling to be finished off) – site now fully functioning.

Membership: 27 people on WP site (few more to be asked if want to be added), including 1st applications direct from new site; 24 on OpenCrisis Googlegroup; (37 on total list…but some of these have just cruised by once…and therefore probably shouldn’t be counted)

Twitter a/c: much more active over last 3 weeks – but could still be moved up notch

Personal Democracy Forum suggested that we submit a talk to them on our South Sudan dataset experience and learnings.

OpenCrisis involved in ongoing discussions (as observer, minor contributor) with HOT, State Dept’s HIU about mechanics of provision of sat imagery to community, workflows prior to HIU’s rollout of MapGive program

Other community activities

Humanitarian Data Project: getting going again – have started an online list of community-created datasets as part of a discussion on how to license and open these. Have also connected HDP to the Ushahidi CrisisNet project (which isn’t aimed at crisismapping, but does have some overlaps with it).

Accademics / SBTF Academics: Joseph launching room and collaboration space this weekend: “I’m in the process of setting a large group of academics for the purpose of creating joint university-level courses in Crisis Mapping, Crisis Management, Geo-Informatics. In addition I think this group is a great forum to discuss inter-institutional consortiums for the design of new approaches and technologies for humanitarians and civil protection. It’s another great way to meet the top academics committed to social good through technology. Join us by adding me on skype @ josephrichardpollack or sending me an email. Looking forward to your participation!” – Joseph.

Data handling guidelines – we need these,and SBTF have asked for some too. Who’s up for research and writing some? BOH is…

ODbL license: may be more restrictive than we (and HOT OSM) think. We need to investigate this asap (especially since all recent OC datasets have ODbL licenses on them), and see if we can get some legal help with it.

info4disasters website: Info4 is regrouping regarding “Country Pages” and EOCs in light of the “found” materials Sara pointed us to on the Wayback Machine (a great archive site for looking for “lost” internet pages)

WHS: info4disasters & SBTF working on the World Humanitarian Summit (deployment of DHN). Proposed that OpenCrisis assist Info4Disasters with part of their remit for this.

Cool tool: MapWarper.net, for aligning old maps with modern location-corrected maps

Has been ‘strongly suggested’ that OpenCrisis contribute to Personal Democracy Forum, June 2014, New York

OpenCrisis is now registered at ALNAP – meaning we get updates on events, jobs, opportunities in humanitarian learning field. “The Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) is a system-wide organisation dedicated to improving the accountability and performance of humanitarian action by strengthening the humanitarian evidence base through sharing lessons, researching key issues and, where appropriate, providing leadership to find collective approaches and solutions.”

GDELT, the conflict data warehouse, is back! see here. And…it has a new home – here.

Sara – post about open data cambodia (but only with permission from team)

Sara – run training session on open data.

Needs

Blogposts for the new website – please write them!

Next month’s plan

By-laws discussion and drafting…and consultation…and adoption

ODbL licensing issues: We need to investigate this asap (especially since all recent OC datasets have ODbL licenses on them), and see if we can get some legal help with it. BOH to talk to Lillian; BOH to draft workflows that community can use with e.g., placename databases to ensure that is clear which data are OSM-compatible, and which not